On Andover Hill the event was a moral cataclysm. Andover girls were country girls, but not of rustic (any more than of metropolitan) social training. Which of them would have suffered an Academy boy, walking home with her from a lecture or a prayer-meeting, any little privilege which he might not have taken in her father's house, and with her mother's knowledge? I never knew one. The case of which I speak was historic, and as far as I ever knew, unique, and was that of a victim, not an offender. The little beauty to whom this atrocity happened cried all night and all the next day; she was reported not to have stopped crying for twenty-six hours. Her pretty face grew wan and haggard. She was too ill to go to her lessons. The teachers--to whom she had promptly related the circumstance--condoled with her; the entire school vowed to avenge her; we were a score of as disturbed and indignant girls as ever wept over woman's wrongs, or scorned a man's depravity. Yet, for aught I know to the contrary, this abandoned young man may have grown up to become a virtuous member of society; possibly even an exemplary husband and father. I have never been able to trace his history; probably the moral repulsion was too great. Yet they were no prigs, for their innocence! Andover girls, in the best and brightest sense of the word, led a gay life. The preponderance of young men on the Hill gave more than ample opportunity for well-mannered good times; and we made the most of them. [Illustration: VIEW LOOKING FROM THE FRONT OF ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS'S HOME IN ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.] Legends of the feminine triumphs of past generations were handed breathlessly down to us, and cherished with awe. A lady of the village, said to have been once very handsome, was credibly reported to have refused nineteen offers of marriage. Another, still plainly beautiful, was known to have received and declined the suits of nine theologues in one winter. Neither of these ladies married. We watched their whitening hairs and serene faces with a certain pride of sex, not easily to be understood by a man. When we began to think how many times they _might_ have married, the subject assumed sensational proportions. In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied, regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace. Each knew--and knew that the rest knew--that it was (to use the Andover phraseology) not of predestination or foreordination, but of free will absolute, that an Andover girl passed through life alone. This little social fact, which is undoubtedly true of most, if not all, university towns, had mingled effects upon impressionable girls. For the proportion of masculine society was almost Western in its munificence. Perhaps it is my duty to say just here that, if honestly put to the question, I should admit that this proportion was almost too munificent for the methods of education then--and still to an extent now--in vogue.